


Round the Seasons

by PseudonymVirtue



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drama, F/M, Family, Family Feels, Marriage, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-15 23:36:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18083138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudonymVirtue/pseuds/PseudonymVirtue
Summary: "Our family isn't like the others because we're like the parts of an organism," Gine explained, "I'm like the eyes and you're the brain. Raditz is the stomach and Kakarot is the heart." An observation of a grandson's inheritance.





	Round the Seasons

_Yesterday a child came out to wonder_   
_Caught a dragonfly inside a jar_   
_Fearful when the sky was full of thunder_   
_And tearful at the falling of a star_

* * *

 

Late spring rains fell early in the morning, pelting against the windows from the outside as if offering warning of the dreary day to come, when the earth's vegetation was seeking relief with parched leaves from the confines if it's stems after a cold, but mild winter.

Gohan stood over the kitchen sink, his fingers wrapped under the handle of his mug. He developed a habit of becoming an avid coffee consumer under Videl's passionate influence, and within their first several months of marriage they'd subscribed to nearly five different coffee subscription companies that boasted beans from the most remote and exotic places in the world.

It became their ritual, when his alarm screamed and he willed himself to slide out of bed and away from her body's warmth, with only the aroma from the kitchen to entice him to do so. It was comforting in a way, because in his childhood he'd often find solace in the smells of his mother's kitchen.

When Pan came that routine changed, and he often found himself sleeping in the guest bedroom to avoid waking the baby and her mother after especially rough nights when Pan woke constantly, demanding to drain to contents of her mother's breast and whatever milk she'd prepped in advance. Videl was constantly in pain, he could tell by her heavy sigh when she cringed under the brush of clothing against her breasts or when she sat down in a seat slowly, bracing the armrests as she did so.

His mother was a godsend during that first week or so of Pan's life (despite her vocal opinions and constant disapproval of their newly adapting parenting styles.) She came in through the front door with his father in tow, directing Goku to clean this, fetch that as she swaddled the babe with skill that could only be acquired through years of mastery. The first hours of sleep they had as parents in their own home happened because his mother willed it to happen.

Videl emerged behind him in a robe, and he offered her a lazy greeting as she walked stiffly to the fridge, her hair matted and the bags under her eyes heavy.

"Rain's coming down pretty hard out there." She noted amidst a yawn.

Gohan hummed in agreement against the brim of the mug.

"Better take the car I guess."

His eyes strayed to hers. She was right, it wouldn't do any good to show up to work wet from flying in the rain. He hated driving the car.

Videl pulled a pitcher of orange juice from the fridge, nudging the door shut with her bare foot as she walked next to him to stand on her tip toes to fetch a cup from the cupboard overhead, until Gohan intercepted her to save her the trouble and grab the cup with his unoccupied hand because it was easier for him due to their difference in height and because he simply missed sharing the morning with her in front of their window over the kitchen sink, though not quite like this. She offered him a grateful smile.

 

_"Thank you."_

 

Bardock only grunted lightly in return, unsure of how she expected him to reciprocate. She was decidedly _his_ , so it didn't make sense for her to offer any sort of gratitude. But that didn't stop her from offering it.

He nudged her foot lightly with his own under the tangle of covers. The little flicker that was their second child emanated from the next room, and they remained in a disarray of flesh on flesh, with her tail tapping the surface of the linens excitedly.

He was hardly one to deny her her son's life. Perhaps once he would've, but not anymore.

Gine was soft, which by extension made him soft, and in the gentle light of their reunion he clutched her like she was all he'd ever had, because she made him feel like he could feel on such a spectrum that he'd never known, and suddenly by association food had more taste, and the stars dazzled with color in the night sky with brilliance that he couldn't have seen before.

It was thrilling, and terrifying to be so vulnerable with a mate, so when he tucked her under his body again, he heard her sigh and he shuddered, because _that_ was what she did to him when her eyes brimmed with tears from seeing him home safe again.

"No need." He rasped, when he decided that he owed her more than a tap of his foot in reciprocation.

It was dawn, and he'd have to leave again soon. The thought came with the dread he'd always felt prior to a complicated mission, one that would force him to be separated from his mate for months at a time.

At least he'd get stronger.

His reverie was interrupted by Gine's words against his chest.

 

_"We need to talk."_

 

Chi Chi cornered Gohan in the kitchen one morning. She found him vulnerable, because he'd been eating breakfast before school ad he could tell she'd woken up extra early to prepare the food.

Daylight had just barely broken and his books were stacked in a neat pile beside his bag at the foot of the table.

"What's up?" Gohan lowered his fork to his plate. His mother looked at him with a strange kind of sternness, like she wasn't sure what kind of expression she was supposed to convey. She leaned against a messy stove, arms crossed over her bathrobe. She cleared her throat and swallowed.

Something had been eating at her. Gohan wracked his brain frantically, trying to conjure a chore he'd missed in the recent past, or a date and time of hers that he'd slipped up on.

There was nothing that he could imagine that she'd want to talk to him about so sternly. His grades had been perfect.

_Unless_... his mind wandered to the time a week prior when Goten had encountered a capybara when they were out training, and insisted they bring it back to their home to live closer. Gohan vehemently denied the little boy at first, citing the most well known fact that he's learned about capybaras being that they were incredibly destructive.

"But he has no family!" Goten had wept, "Capybaras are social animals! And he's all alone!"

Gohan was unsure of how his brother had learned so much about oversized rodents that were so rare in the area, but he complied, swearing Goten to secrecy and instilling a no-tolerance for damage policy.

So when his mother looked at him so sternly in the kitchen when he was eating breakfast, it was all he could think of.

"Goten talked me into bringing it here, he's been overzealous about rodents lately." Gohan blurted, causing his mother's eyebrows to raise in bewilderment. She looked at him blankly for a moment.

"What are you talking about?"

"N-Nothing."

Chi Chi brought a hand to the ridge of her nose, rubbing it in exasperation with her elbow propped against the sash of her robe. Gohan sank in his seat. He'd made it a point to burden his mother at little as possible over the years, because he'd known what stress his father put of her with both his life and his passing.

"Look, I don't know what _that's_ about..." Chi Chi sighed, trying to weigh the context of his words before throwing them from her mind. "I need to talk to you about something else."

Gohan had shoveled another forkful into him out and chewed slowly. She was nervous, and that made him nervous.

"I need to talk to you about girls." Chi Chi declared, staring him in the eye and clearing her throat. " _We_ need to talk about girls."

" _Mom._ " Gohan lamented, waving his hands in surrender with food in his mouth still. "I already know about-"

"Listen. I already know. I'm not stupid, you know. I see how it is, first you were 'blackmailed' into a date last week," Chi Chi emphasized with air quotations, "And now all the sudden you're throwing away your underwear- I know what that means. And this week? Another girl Erasa is calling the house to asking about 'studying' with you? And another girl shows up at our house looking for you, that Videl?"

Gohan's air escaped his lungs and his heart hammered hard in sympathetic response.

Fight or flight.

Flight or fight.

What did his mom think he was throwing away his underwear for, anyway? He'd be blackmailed _for keeping it._

He opened his mouth to offer an explanation, because as mother and son they'd developed a rather open ended string of communication in the years after his father's death.

"Look, I'm _just_ saying that I want you to keep your grades up. Videl is a very nice girl but please don't get her pregnant. Not yet."

He felt the color drain from his face, knowing at this point it was futile to attempt to redirect the conversation. Sometimes in battles you had you let your opponent swing here and there and give them the illusion of the upper hand.

"You remember how horrible I felt when I was pregnant with Goten?"

"Yes."

"Well imagine that, but on a pretty girl like Videl, and aside from crushing any chance she'd have of getting into a good college early in life, let me tell you her body will never-" Chi Chi emphasized with a stroke of her pointer finger in the air "- _ne_ ver be the same. Ever."

"Okay mom."

"That's all I wanted to say."

Gohan nodded, not daring to initiate eye contact.

"That, and your first time will be a lot of fun for you but not for her. So take that into consideration."

Gohan winced.

"Thanks mom. Will do."

Chi Chi eyed him suspiciously, now gripping the neckline of her robe and nervously brushing it against her chin. Goten emerged from the hall and greeted his mom before helping himself to the breakfast spread. She was in a far off plane now. She got that way sometimes, when she was reminded of his father.

When Goten joined them, he climbed into his seat nudged his brother under the table with his foot. And when Gohan lifted his gaze from the bowl before him that was as empty as his thoughts, he was pulled back down to earth by his brother's expression of self-contained amusement at the crows flitting about outside the window.

No one ever fully explained to Goten why his smile made his mother blink back tears, or why it possessed Bulma to pull him in for a tight hug, Krillin to chuckle and ruffle his hair, or Vegeta to wrinkle his nose and curl his lips ever so slightly.

Gohan smiled back at him. Goten didn't understand, because he had the smile and the countenance of a father he'd never met.

"Watch this!" Goten's attention was directed at his cereal now, and he picked up a piece and set it on the lip of his spoon before tossing it in the air and catching it in his mouth.

He frowned at Gohan's unimpressed expression.

 

_"Were you watching?"_

 

Raditz inquired eagerly, almost so eager it was damn near pathetic,

Bardock had never seen anything more damning than Raditz's first kill. The corpse was burnt to fine dust like cinders, leaving only tight knobs of joints articulating in the dirts amidst a pile of smoldering intestines and bile.

He wrinkled his nose, casting a sideways glance at his son.

"We could've used that meat." He said simply, shaking his head as he crouched over the corpse, sinewy muscle layered upon sinewy muscle, casting an imposing shadow as he crouched eye-level with the young boy.

Raditz's features faltered for a moment, caught off guard and visibly perturbed by his father's disapproval.

"Yeah but, did you see me when I did it?"

Bardock had to admit, the kid had strength. He had balls. He could surely hold his own against experienced men twice his age.

But Raditz was so damn reckless, acting instantly and thinking later. A trait he was sure to attribute to Gine, because however gentle she was, she was also so damn impulsive, while his own mind worked by systematically, and not impulsively.

"It doesn't matter if I saw," Bardock replied bluntly, curiously nudging what remained of the beast with his foot.

Nope. Nothing to salvage. The bubbling pile of spoils lay before him like a lame trophy.

It was a lame trophy, but in hindsight Bardock wished he hadn't instilled the constant sentiment of disappointment in his oldest son, or Raditz wouldn't soon be seeking approval elsewhere to those willing to give praise for showing brute force with no demand for reasoning.

But he couldn't help but be stern, because there was something in Raditz's smile that he didn't approve of.

 

_"What are you looking at?"_

 

Videl questioned him with a furrowed brow. Her blue eyes were like polished grey brook stones in comparison to the summer sky, though in the winter when she sat perched in front of his mother's window with the grey sky outside, her eyes reminisced of blue summer.

This past summer when the rain fell hard the first time he'd gone to visit her in her seasonal apartment on the coast of South City, she ran outside the greet him in a sweatshirt and shorts, her chin length chair tucked behind her head in a small ponytail.

He'd taken her to a blue hole somewhere deep in a thicket of trees he remembered from when he was small- when the world was so large and terrifying and he was merely trying to survive it on his own.

They removed their clothes, save for their underwear and jumped in it, and the world turned to a rush of water against his ears until he opened his eyes and saw hers, looking upward toward the bent sunlight underwater, stroking her arms gracefully toward when the beams churned on the surface.

Green leaves were on the trees that gave them shade when Gohan rested his chin on her shoulder from behind her, feeling the hot burn that the sun had given her warming him against the chill of condensation in the humid evening breeze.

Autumn brought yellow, gold, and red.

Winter made her eyes that much more blue in it's cool undertones, made dimmer by shorter days and longer nights. It didn't stop her from dropping in with his family on a winter holiday, the first one he'd spent with his father since he wasn't much older than Goten.

The doorbell rang and his mother answered it, and he jumped at the sound of her voice. She offered Chi Chi a quick embrace and distributed gifts, amicably passing Goku's to his hands where he lay on the couch perpendicular to Gohan's seat as she admitted she didn't know what to get him, so she could return it if needed. Goten shrieked at the prospect of the surprise of a last minute gift and tore his open in the midst of protests from his mother.

And in the middle of it all, Videl, sank down on the armrest of his chair, leaning into him.

"What are you looking at?"

Her face was a constellation of contradictions- feminine and soft meeting stern and hard, like she was the first time he looked as her.

In his peripheral Goku offered a rehearsed measure of gratitude towards Videl for the gift, not long before Goten chucked a ball of wrapping paper at his father's face with such force that it made a loud smack causing Videl to jump and Chi Chi to raise her voice at them in the kitchen. Goku hopped to his feet in an instant to scoop the boy up and bury him in a fit of laughter under his white T-shirt.

"I just wasn't expecting you to make it, is all. I thought you and your dad were traveling." Gohan told her gently, though elevating his tone to override the yells of his father and brother beside them.

"We were. But I made last minute arrangements." Videl reasoned casually, as if she merely suggested a change in the weather, rather than the tedious task of rearranging her travel plans from halfway around the world to spend this day with him.

Gohan pressed his forehead to where her sweater met her ribs. She always smelled good.

"I'm glad you're here." He reassured her, aware that he had been in such shock to have her show up at the door perhaps he hadn't let her know how happy it made him.

Videl squeezed him against her, her face softening and lips parting to offer some sort of response, but Chi Chi called her to the kitchen to fill up a plate, which piqued Goku's interest as he wrangled Goten in the folds of his shirt, earning him a scold from his wife for stretching out the neckline of the garment.

"It doesn't get any quieter around here, you know." Gohan warned her as he followed her into the kitchen, his eyes full of sympathy.

Videl laughed.

 

_"I know."_

 

Gine's voice was husky and firm, and at times caused him to shudder in the dark.

It was a rare occurrence to have such a quiet night with her, but it was nice because sometimes when they spent so much time together in between Bardock's conquests it captured too much attention for his liking, and he hated it.

Gine was a strange one from the start, strange as a Saiyan, as a mate, and as a mother. And in a way, his attraction to her made him even stranger than she. She pulled him in with both grace and her crooked smile that reminded him of how he'd rabidly vanquished the beast that broke her jaw one time, and it'd never quite set right after that.

No, he didn't care much for nosy people.

On this night the stars winked down on him as he dangled his legs over the edge of a cliff, away from the bonfire that Gine had extinguished after their meal, leaving only scraps of meat on the carcass over the ashes that clung in strands to bone and tendons. The air was still fresh with the same taste of metallic blood and salty fat.

She clapped her hands as she approached him from behind, effectively wiping the dust of ash and smoke from her palms. Their previous conversation had irritated him, because unlike most fathers he'd known he cared about the perception of his children, not simply as a reflection on his own ability but as people.

Raditz was respected. He'd likely always be respected. But he was blood thirst made him brash and careless.

But Kakarot was too weak to ever be respected. That wasn't to say he wouldn't find his place in society through other means, of course, like Gine. But it bothered him, and when he was across the galaxy he'd make a conscious effort to push thoughts of Kakarot from his mind until he was home again- where he'd often find Gine looking longingly at the child with her fingers spread over the glass of his incubator.

And because Bardock was perceptive, he knew that she wanted to hold him.

"Don't worry so much about him." Gine continued the conversation he hated with a flicker of her tail as she sat beside him.

"I'm not worried." Bardock countered too quickly to convince her.

"Our family isn't like the others because we're like the parts of an organism," Gine explained, "I'm like the eyes and you're the brain. Raditz is the stomach and Kakarot is the heart."

Bardock snorted. " _You're_ the brain." He told her, not failing to provide tenderness in his words.

"Fine then. Sometimes I think you're more like the teeth, anyway."

They sat beside one another in silence for a while as he mulled over her words in his mind.

"I'm afraid that organism needs more than that to survive." He said at last.

"Well of course," Gine chuckled at his dry wit, "Those are the parts that haven't been born yet."

 

* * *

 

Sometimes Gohan heard her through the walls of at night after he'd gone to bed and lay with the shades drawn in complete darkness with his hands behind his head.

He heard his mother cry, but he'd never let her know it. In the mornings she strode through their home with a purpose, rearranging furniture, dusting the walls and the crevices of the ceilings, and she even coated the crevices of the wooden floors with new finish. Their home was a swirl of chemicals and smells, and he half believed she was attempting to resurrect his father from the dead herself with the ferocity with which she cleaned, but even if she was successful he was sure she'd kill him herself as soon as she could.

She didn't cry loudly or anything, and if her chipper attitude at dinnertime was any indication of her mood she wouldn't feel like crying at all. But he'd listen to her walk fast down the hall past his room like she always did, close her door and do something to distract her son's sensitive ears, like draw a bath or turn on the dehumidifier, and he felt her breath stop and quicken with the heaving of her chest.

Gohan was overwhelmed with guilt when he heard it, knowing that it was because of his own actions that his father had to sacrifice himself. He did his best to do well by his father's request for him to look after his mother, but it was hard to do when he knew how sad it made her.

When she started getting sick, he heard it, vulgar sounding retching in the bathroom and in the kitchen and even outside. It seemed she was always nauseous. It was then that he felt really awful- he'd not only given his mother a reason to grieve but her grief was so horrible she was throwing up!

He found her in the kitchen one night, after he was supposed to be in bed. It wasn't on a night when she cried but he felt her awake and he couldn't lay awake anymore.

"Gohan? What's wrong, honey?" She asked from the table with both hands wrapped around a tea mug with peppermint vapors while the remaining heat in the tea kettle rustled about on the stove.

Gohan looked at her with heavy eyes. Like her, he went about his days in good spirits.

Normally he knew better than to engage his mother when it was past bedtime, but he slid down into the seat across from her where his father always sat, palms flat on the table in front of him.

"Dad is dead because of me." He told her flatly.

She blinked back at him. Her expression didn't harden, the way it did when his father did something she hated- why wasn't she hardening towards him?

"Honey-"

"No. I have to tell you this. I _have_ to tell you what I did, how it happened."

She opened her mouth and closed it again, as if conjuring and reassembling words that she wasn't sure how to use. But because she had been a fighter once, a warrior even, she put those words aside so that she could acknowledge him as the same.

 

_"Alright. Tell me."_

 

Bardock spat the syllables out harshly, the humid jungle air so thick that he in fact could've been choking and wouldn't have known the difference.

"No." Gine fired back, her gentle eyes narrowed in defiance.

She dragged him out here despite her wounds demanding to have a word with him away from the others. He'd damn near saved her ass that day and she repaid him with nothing but sass.

That stirred something in him, deep, deep down.

"You've got balls, Gine. Spot on. But you're no warrior."

Her expression tensed and her demeanor flipped in an instant, causing her to glance downwards to his side.

"I-I know." Gine stammered. "I've _always_ known that."

"So why did you come?"

_Tell me._

As an ally, Gine was loyal and smart. More than most Saiyans. She was honest. She was fast, sometimes too fast for her own good. But she lacked instinct, and it damn near cost him his own life whenever he had to put it on the line for hers.

She shot her head back up at him, eyes fiery again. Her face was so expressive and her body so animated, with her tail flitting about with every word. Sweat from the air moistened her hairline and clung in her eyebrows, clumping her eyelashes, and pooled at the small dip over her lips.

Streaks of blood still stuck to her chest. She looked like shit, but he knew he probably looked worse.

"So... I just wanted to be near _you_." She emphasized the last word in an aggressive tone, but her words were anything but.

Bardock took her words in. This woman's mind was all over the place- just when he thought he knew what it was she was getting at, she'd blurt out something insane.

She was insane.

Whatever it was that she stirred in him before boiled in his veins. Or perhaps it was the heat encased under the canopy of the trees.

He laughed at her, because it was the only response to him that made sense in the moment, and he felt her frown up at him, and that only made him laugh even harder.

"Stop _laughing_!" Gine growled, and a second later her fist was caught in his hand in a meager attempt to swing at him that her wounded shoulder.

She was angry, and the boiling in his veins he now knew to be lust started to consume him as his hand slid from her fist to her wrist and he pulled her backwards by that arm against the trunk of a great tree, momentarily forgetting that she was freshly wounded. She winced and grunted in response when her back made hard contact with it, the air being temporarily expelled from her lungs with the force in which he tugged her against the sharp layer of bark.

In an attempt of an apology he grabbed her face in both hands and kissed her so fully that the sweat pooled below her nose had spilled onto his lips and by the time she responded to his advances he'd forgotten where they were, and what had gotten them there in the first place.

 

_Ah._

 

Pan arrived in the middle of the night, passed directly from the womb she had occupied to her mother's arms, slippery and bloody the entire way.

The umbilical cord pulsed, pulled taut by dual clamps pressed down as the midwife nudged Gohan with an elbow, surgical scissors in hand.

"Want to do the honors?"

_'Um, no.'_ He wanted to say, because the thought of taking scissors to anything connected to Videl or their daughter let alone both was downright terrifying.

"It's okay Gohan," Videl urged him breathlessly, beaming up at him with tired eyes as she rocked the baby. "It won't hurt."

He felt a little silly being reassured by this, after being by Videl's bedside for the last 14 hours witnessing her in incredible discomfort from labor.

He cut the cord and a nurse took Pan to wipe her down and weigh her.

"My, she's heavier than she looks!"

Videl grabbed his hand, flashing him a knowing smile. "Runs in the family."

It was surreal, that they were now in charge of caring for a little person. Videl's first concern was feeding her, but Pan seemed to refuse to latch and despite reassurances from the nurses, she wasn't convinced it was normal.

His parents and Goten arrived, and when Videl brought it up to Chi Chi the problem only seem exacerbated.

"Well I don't know," His mother and Videl studied her breast together as Goten impatiently stood with balloons and a wrapped gift in hand, "I never had a problem with _these_ boys latching."

"Mom!"

Pan slept contentedly as she was passed to Chi Chi's arms, who rocked her adoringly. "Oh, Gohan she's lovely." His mother was teary eyed, and for a moment he remembered her back in their kitchen, when he told her the full story about his father's death and she replied by telling him she was pregnant with Goten. It wasn't all the long ago but felt like a lifetime all the same.

Chi Chi passed Pan to his father, fussing with the blanket and coaching him gently in his ear on how to hold her, and though he followed her direction Gohan noted that Goku seemed to find right nook in his arms to cradle Pan with a large hand behind her head all on his own.

Goten was last, sitting down at Videl's feet on the bed as he was instructed so that Goku could kneel in front of him and pass him the baby while Chi Chi showed him what to do with his arms.

The day was a blur of visitors in between naps and feedings (when Pan finally latched). His family left soon after Mr. Satan arrived, then Bulma, Vegeta, and Trunks, Krillin and Eighteen, Piccolo, and after sundown Yamcha and Oolong arrived in sweaty gym clothes.

A nurse came and offered to take Pan to the nursery for the night, and Gohan looked to his sleeping wife and nodded his approval, deciding to take Bulma and his mother up on their encouragement to do so.

He kissed Videl's hand lightly as he stood, following the nurse outside the room with Pan in her hospital bassinet.

The lights of the hospital had been dimmed for the evening, and he walked with his hands in his pockets, stomach still growling despite the meal that his mother had brought for them and the delivery from the hospital kitchen.

He could go for a meal in the cafeteria. Or at least a vending machine somewhere. He passed a new mother walking the hall in her gown, and several staff in scrubs the offered him a polite smile and greeting as they passed and he did in return.

He stopped in front of the window glass of the nursery where Pan had been wheeled into only moments before, and positioned at the end of a row of babies. It was still so new and surreal that somewhere in that room, a piece of him existed.

Was this what was meant by legacy?

A little girl with his eyes.

His stomach flipped.

He pressed his hand to the glass and leaned into it, instantly longing for his daughter.

The nurse opened the nursery door beside him.

"Hey new dad," She smirked and jerked her chin in the direction of the room behind her. "Wanna come hold her some more?"

He thought of all the things he wanted to tell Pan someday, and all the things he wanted her to know and to think. Like how scared he was when he met Piccolo, how his dad taught him to fish before he could talk properly, Frieza on Namek, his mother's recipe secrets, Cell, and how it felt to look at her mother for the first time.

"Yeah. I do, actually." Gohan turned and followed the nurse to where his daughter wriggled in her swaddle, as if in an attempt to reach for him.

"The crazy thing they don't tell you about children," his father told him earlier that day, when Videl and Chi Chi fussed over getting Pan to feed as Goten watched the hospital room TV with balloons still in hand, "Is how _crazy_ it can be to have this little person who looks like you, and talks like you and acts like you. Sometime you think they're you. But they're not you. They're someone else."

Gohan chuckled, "What're you getting at, dad?"

Goku returned the sentiment, lifting an arm around Gohan's shoulders. "I guess I'm saying that you'll do better than me, because you're not me. You're you."

 

* * *

 

The very end was the collaboration of now and then, all the things that ever were or ever would be.

Bardock knew confronting Frieza would certainly end in death. And not just a simple, painless passing, there would be fatigue from battle, and at best there would be temporary triumph followed by absolute failure.

Only days before he expelled Kakarot from the incubator, dressed him, and placed him in the pod he'd procured from the palace. Gine watched from the doorway, eyes full with emotion, as their son cooed and playfully reached for her.

All that time she spent looking at him through the glass, yet she never even moved to touch him.

Why didn't he suggest that she hold him? What would it matter, if their race would certainly extinct under Frieza's direction and Kakarot would be living out his days on Earth, if he lived at all?

The heat was the first thing he felt. It felt a little nice at first, but only for a fraction of a second. Then the blaze turned to liquid heat, boiling to the touch as Frieza looked down on him, and for a moment that would be the last face he'd ever see.

Until he saw a boy. The same boy he'd placed in the pod, ignoring his cries as he beat against the glass while Gine cried.

She tried to reason with him- do Saiyan fathers care this much for their offspring?

"I'd like to save something for once." He told her.

He was hardier than most and it took him longer to die, leaving him privy to the sensation of his limbs shredding and separating from his body as he screamed, the hot heat scalding him with agony that he could no longer comprehend.

He could only scream.

The boy swung from trees and dove naked into a river. He rode a cloud around the planet and slept in a house under the stars with an earthling girl. He singlehandedly defeated an army and battled a demon. He found a mate and had a child. He became stronger than Raditz, and then stronger than Frieza.

 

_He became a super-saiyan._

_What?_

 

"Don't forget us!" Gine cried at the sky when Kakarot was reduced to but a single streak of light in their peripheral.

Bardock remembered the tree where he first mated with Gine, it's trunk thick enough that it seemed like a good place to take her against, but the surface was so gnarled and sharp that he laid her down among the roots ahead. The ground muddy and the moss was crawling with insects but she clung to him anyway. The roots that conjoined to the trunk gave way to branches- hundreds and hundreds of them that extended to the sky so far past the other trees, some of them separating in clusters, some of them dead, and some of them spawning leaves, and remembering the branches he remembered Gine's claim:

 

_"Kakarot is the heart."_

 

* * *

 

_Take your time, it won't be long now_   
_Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down_   
_And the seasons they go round and round_   
_And the painted ponies go up and down_   
_We're captive on the carousel of time_   
_We can't return we can only look behind_   
_From where we came._

_"The Circle Game" Joni Mitchell_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm definitely far from a dragon ball scholar, so any interpretation of Bardock and the Saiyans I have outside of the main anime is from the Super Broly movie, that is all. I wanted more raw parallels between Gohan and Bardock, but ended up with this instead. Thanks for reading!


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